Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming dBpoweramp Plug-in

I had a similar experience. Advice I received was:-

�Before ripping the disc, go to the Review Metadata window and make sure that the Artist and Album Artist fields say Various Artists.

Next to the Album Artist field, there's a "to all" button. He should click on that.

Click OK to accept metadata changes and then proceed with ripping.�

See if that helps.

Thanks Nick.

So basically this means you can't have track level artists at all, you have to copy 'various artists' to each track? That's disappointing, one of the benefits of dBpa, to my mind, is it can write track level data like that, even if Sooloos can't (yet) read it... Oy vey.

I do like the plugin for the ability to write to different formats while ripping, but I have to say, this has fixed none of my feelings about the shortcomings of Sooloos for Classical. Must say I'm disappointed. To give an example of why I think that flies in the face of the power Sooloos is supposed to offer -

Say I have Classical albums with multiple composers (this happens a lot) but I want to focus on one particular composer. Well how do I do that? 'Various' is hardly a focus, is it??

I have given HQ this feedback already.

dBpa in normal mode handles various artists very well and puts them into a single folder.

In the meantime (and for a while now) I use mp3tag to quickly re-tag the track title to include the artist.

This is very clunky still and I do hope M are savvy to this and have on the plan to fix.

Cool, I won't bother to call them then - I've already fed back what I feel about the way Sooloos handles this in general

In M's favour, I think this particular behavior is more a dBpa bug as it writes lots of artist folders in the alac folder I have for iTunes rips? It's the general non-handling of track level artists M need to sort out, it cripples Sooloos with classical collections.

OK so I guess I'll go find MP3 tag <sigh>...

Unlikely to be a bug... just a setting you need to use.

Did you check the "compilation" box?

Yep, the compilation box was checked.

Nick, do you think they intend dBpa to write multiple artist folders even on a compilation album with 'various artists'/composers checked? If that's the case, I don't understand the function of track level metadata? This isn't just a Meridian plugin behavior, it seems to be application-wide...

As I understand it, it's defined by how you set the file naming options in dBpa.

Could you elaborate? If there's a way to retain the metadata I want without generating hundreds of artist folders that would be fab...

Please post a screen shot of your dBpa front screen and the FLAC encoding subpages (like the ones I used above). That will be easier to review.

This is how I've organised the file naming in dBpa.



and this is how the files are structured, a single folder per album and track level data including artist/composer or whatever

dBpa front (main) screen also please.